What is it that I employ my metaphysics on? To perplex our clearest notions and living moral instincts? To extinguish the light of love and of conscience, to put out the life of arbitrement, to make myself and others _worthless, soulless, Godless_? No, to expose the folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the blessed organ of language, to support all old and venerable truths, to support, to kindle, to project, to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to make our feelings diffuse vital warmth through our reason--these are my objects and these my subjects. Is this the metaphysic that bad spirits in hell delight in?
[Sidenote: IN THE VISIONS OF THE NIGHT Nov. 2, 1803, Wednesday morning, 20 minutes past 2 o'clock]
The voice of the Greta and the cock-crowing. The voice seems to grow like a flower on or about the water beyond the bridge, while the cock-crowing is nowhere particular--it is at any place I imagine and do not distinctly see. A most remarkable sky! the moon, now waned to a perfect ostrich egg, hangs over our house almost, only so much beyond it, garden-ward, that I can see it, holding my head out of the smaller study window. The sky is covered with whitish and with dingy cloudage, thin dingiest scud close under the moon, and one side of it moving, all else moveless; but there are two great breaks of blue sky, the one stretches over our house and away toward Castlerigg, and this is speckled and blotched with white cloud; the other hangs over the road, in the line of the road, in the shape of an ellipse or shuttle, I do not know what to call it--this is unspeckled, all blue, three stars in it--more in the former break, all unmoving. The water leaden-white, even as the grey gleam of water is in latest twilight. Now while I have been writing this and gazing between-whiles (it is forty minutes past two), the break over the road is swallowed up, and the stars gone; the break over the house is narrowed into a rude circle, and on the edge of its circumference one very bright star. See! already the white mass, thinning at its edge, _fights_ with its brilliance. See! it has bedimmed it, and now it is gone, and the moon is gone. The cock-crowing too has ceased. The Greta sounds on for ever. But I hear only the ticking of my watch in the pen-place of my writing-desk and the far lower note of the noise of the fire, perpetual, yet seeming uncertain. It is the low voice of quiet change, of destruction doing its work by little and little.